For almost two decades after World War II and well into the Cold War, high-ranking, charming
British intelligence agent Kim Philby served as a spy for the Soviet Union. He survived so long,
journalist Ben Macintyre argues, because he was part of the British old boys’ network. He was an
upper-class Cambridge graduate whose acts and beliefs were never examined closely because he was “
one of us.”

The absorbing
A Spy Among Friends follows Philby from his recruitment by the intelligence service
through his defection to the Soviet Union in 1963, with particular attention to his relationship
with two of his closest friends.

Nicholas Elliott, who eventually extracted a confession from Philby over tea in Beirut — that
was “a display of brutal English politeness, civilized and lethal” — was the son of the headmaster
of Eton. He grew up “highly intelligent, cheerful and lazy,” and with a talent for making friends
that he would later say was “his most important skill and the foundation of his career.”

James Angleton, American but educated in Britain, met Philby and Elliott after the war, when he
was stationed in Great Britain with the OSS, the precursor of the CIA. He and Philby further
developed their friendship when Philby was stationed in Washington, ostensibly pumping Angleton for
information for the British but in fact channeling it to the Soviets.

Anyone who has ever been baffled by the difference between MI5, the British security service,
and MI6, the intelligence service, will find that Macintyre gives the clearest possible explanation
of that distinction. He bases it not just on the roles of the two organizations, with MI5 being the
rough equivalent of the FBI and MI6 of the CIA, but on their class distinctions, with MI5 being
staffed by former police officers and soldiers, and MI6 by Oxford and Cambridge graduates.

It’s clear from Macintyre’s analysis that MI5 was far readier to suspect Philby than MI6 was,
and that only the actions of Philby’s powerful friends in the intelligence service allowed him to
feed information to the Soviet Union as long as he did.

Macintyre peoples his story with enticing minor characters worthy of tales of their own, like
the nanny for Elliott’s children, a widow “who had enormous feet, drank gin from a bottle labeled ‘
Holy Water,’ and doubled as Elliott’s informal bodyguard.” Then there’s one of Angleton’s
informants, “a corpulent Italian journalist” who wrote for the Vatican newspaper and penned “
best-selling, semi-pornographic novels” on the side.

Macintyre’s account, always entertaining and often funny, is grounded in a recognition of the
horrifying cost in lives of Philby’s betrayal of his country, and the ways in which assumptions by
his fellow intelligence officers exacerbated that cost.

It’s also a story of personal betrayal on an almost unbelievable scale.